This document is copyright 1999 and 2000 Matthew S. Tiscareno. Full
permission is given to reproduce or distribute this document, or to
rearrange/reformat it for other media, as long as credit is given and no words
are added or deleted from the text.

NOTE: This website has not been updated since early in this decade. I do
not have the time or inclination to maintain it, but I have decided to keep it
available as a product of its time. So please read with discernment and check
sources. -MST (10 September 2009)

Is There Really Scientific Evidence for a Young Earth?

For the past several decades, the question of the age of the Earth has been a
very divisive one among Christians. Many people (known as "Young-Earth
Creationists") believe that the only valid interpretation of the Bible indicates
that the Earth is 10,000 years old or less, and they also claim to have
scientific evidence that supports this view of the Earth. At the same time,
there are many others who believe that scientific evidence overwhelmingly
supports the claim that the Earth is about 4.6 billion years old, while the
Universe as a whole is 10 to 20 billion years old. Many people in this latter
category affirm the intimate involvement of God in this process of creation.

It is not the purpose of this paper to discuss theology, but this author
firmly believes that a literal interpretation of Genesis allows for an Old-Earth
view that is consistent with mainstream science. I say this only to emphasize
that this paper is not intended to oppose any Christian beliefs, or to tear down
anyone's faith. Rather, the purpose of this paper is to ensure that our Faith is
based firmly on Truth, and not merely wishful thinking.

Through the ages, many people have denied certain facts of nature because
those facts did not fit into the belief system that they desired to hold to.
Both Christians and atheists are commonly guilty of this error. It should be
obvious that any Christian who believes that God is the ordainer and framer of
this world, and that God is the initiator of all logic and scientific thought,
should never take such a position. The purpose of this paper is to show that
Young-Earth Creationists, however unintentionally, have in fact done this.
Regardless of what we may think the Bible says, the facts of nature are also
ordained by God, and it is not right deny them or to misrepresent them in order
to support any particular belief system. The purpose of this paper is to set
forth the facts of nature in light of the claims made by Young-Earth Creationist
leaders in hope that, by better understanding the facts of nature, we will also
come to a better understanding of God's greater source of revelation - the words
of the Bible.

Concerning References: A large number of articles from scientific
journals are referenced in this fact sheet, and I strongly encourage interested
readers to look at this source material. In general, these journals should be
available at your local university library, and in some cases the public
library. If not, you can ask your librarian about an inter-library loan, which
is generally available for a nominal fee. Many journal articles are also
available online, one good source for finding them is the Astrophysical Data
System Abstract Service (http://adsabs.harvard.edu/abstract_service.html).
All of the young-Earth claims addressed in this fact sheet can be found in books
published by Young-Earth organizations. In brackets, after the title of each
claim, are references indicating where the claim can be found, in case the
reader would like to look at the source to better understand the Young-Earth
arguments. Most references are from the 1995 version of The Defender's Bible
(DB), an official ICR publication, or the 1992 version of The Illustrated
Origins Answer Book (OAB) by Paul S. Taylor. Both of these are Young-Earth
publications that include extensive lists of "young-Earth evidences," and both
of them are still distributed by the Institute for Creation Research (the most
prominent young-Earth organization), and so can be assumed to receive their
approval. The references to the Defender's Bible give the page number
followed by the number that the claim receives on that page. All of the
arguments from the Origins Answer Book are found on pages 18-20, and are
numbered from 1 to 107. I also included a few claims from the ICR Creation
Online course (http://www.creationonline.org/frame.htm).

Acknowledgements: Thanks to all those that have offered comments and
advice for this fact sheet, including Hill Roberts, Tim Swindle, William Keel,
Mike Tice, George Bendo, Adam Crowl, Kyle Witten, Marj Harmon, and Bob Stuart.
Additionally, some useful lines of reasoning were suggested to me by writings of
Hugh Ross, Don Stoner, and Hill Roberts, which are referenced
below.

Note to Reader: The most important element of this fact sheet to me is
its scientific accuracy. My purpose is to investigate "young-Earth evidences"
honestly and responsibly, confident that God will be glorified by the Truth
regardless of its theological implications. Therefore, if you have any comments
or suggestions regarding anything in this fact sheet, please contact me. My goal
of clarity and accuracy can only be fully reached with the help of others who
are also familiar with the material. Although I would love comments on any part
of the fact sheet, I would particularly appreciate any help on the few remaining
sections that are printed in italics, indicating places where the fact sheet is
not yet finished. My email address is matthewt at lpl dot arizona dot edu
Thanks and God bless you.

It has been proposed by Young-Earth scientists that all of the magnetic
reversals recorded in the sea floor were created during Noah's Flood. There are
several problems with this theory that make it physically implausible, but
regardless of whether or not this theory is valid, the fact remains that a
coherent Old-Earth theory exists to explain the recent decline in Earth's
magnetic field strength. Therefore, that decline should not be used to argue
against an ancient Earth.

Incidentally, a misunderstanding of how "leap seconds" work has led some
people to grossly overestimate the rate of change of Earth's rotation. The U.S.
Naval Observatory, along with other international agencies, adds a "leap second"
to the calendar whenever they determine that Earth's rotation is out-of-sync
with their atomic clocks. Properly understood, the rate of about one "leap
second" every two years does not mean that Earth's rotation is slowing by
a half-second every year. Rather, it means that Earth's rotation is consistently
a tiny fraction slower than it was when the length of the second was rigorously
defined, a discrepency that builds up over a year to a difference of half a
second. If Earth's rotation were really declining measurably, we would expect to
see "leap seconds" become more and more frequent, since every year the
discrepency in year-length would be greater than it was the previous year. In
fact, we do not see this. "Leap seconds" are due, not to a consistent decline,
but to fluctuations in Earth's rotation rate about a mean value, which are
caused by entirely different processes and have little long-term effect. On the
other hand, the consistent deceleration of Earth by the Moon is so slow that it
cannot be directly measured (physical calculations put it at about one second
every 70,000 years), although it is corroborated by fossil corals that show more
days per year in the past.

Maximum Life of Comets [DB 1507 (32,33); OAB 17,18]
The claim is that comets that pass close to the Sun (the comets we see) cannot
have survived for 4.6 billion years in their present orbits. This is not
necessarily true for some comets with very long orbital periods, but generally
the point is a valid one. However, this claim is a
One-Sided Equation that considers the rate at which comets are destroyed
without considering how the comet population is replenished. The population of
comets is kept in equilibrium by new comets which are continuously introduced
into our solar system from beyond Pluto's orbit. When they are far away from the
Sun's deteriorating effects, comets can last indefinitely. Comets that are in
orbits which bring them close to the sun have not been in those orbits since the
formation of the solar system, rather they were perturbed into a close-encounter
trajectory by some larger body (e.g. a planet or star or even another comet).
Based upon observed comet orbits, scientists have concluded that they come from
two major comet sources: the Kuiper belt, a disk-shaped cloud just beyond the
orbit of Neptune; and the Oort cloud, a spherically-shaped cloud that may
stretch for as far as 1 light-year from the Sun. One piece of evidence favoring
this theory is the fact that comets, unlike everything else in the Solar System,
have retrograde orbits just as commonly as they have prograde orbits (See
Orbits
in the Solar System, above). This is strong evidence that comets are not in
their original orbits, that rather their orbital directions were picked up
randomly when they were thrown into their present orbits, in keeping with the
Oort/Kuiper theory. However, due to their small size, low reflectivity, and
great distance from the Sun, these objects are nearly impossible to detect. But
since the Oort/Kuiper theory is coherent and explains all of the evidence amply,
it alone should be sufficient to dispense with the young-Earth objection
concerning comet lifetimes. Recently, however, our telescope technology has
improved to the point where we no longer need to rely on theory alone to deal
with this objection. Since 1995, over 50 Kuiper belt objects have been
discovered, dramatically confirming the Oort/Kuiper theory of comet origins.
Kuiper belt observations continue to be an ongoing frontier of Planetary
Science.

Instability of Saturn's Rings [DB 1507 (36); OAB
77] Like the question of Titan's methane, the question of the instability of
Saturn's rings is an
Unexplained Mystery that arises primarily as a result of insufficient data.
Saturn's ring system is extremely complex, and we have had very few opporunities
to study it up close (Pioneer 11 and the two Voyager spacecraft were all brief
flybys with limited instrumentation). At our present state of knowledge, it is
true that we do not know how Saturn's rings could have remained stable for
longer than 10 to 100 million years. There are two main possible solutions to
this problem: either the secret of the rings' stability is yet to be discovered,
or the ring system is in fact much younger than Saturn itself. The second
possibility is intriguing: the rings of giant planets may be cyclical, being
regenerated by material that strays to near and is pulled apart by the planet's
gravity, and then dissipating again over time. In fact, if Saturn's rings are
due to a relatively recent such event, it would explain why Saturn is the only
one of the four giant planets to have such a large ring system. Whatever the
solution to this problem may be, we should learn a great deal about it from the
Cassini spacecraft, due to arrive at Saturn in 2004. And in any case, even if it
does turn out that Saturn's rings are relatively young, there is no reason why
such a discovery should have any implication for the age of Saturn itself, much
less the age of the Solar System or the Universe.

Supernova Remnants [ICR Creation Online] This
argument comes from an article by Canadian young-Earth advocate Keith Davies (http://www.creation.on.ca/cdp/snrart.html),
who claims that astronomers do not observe enough supernova remnants (SNRs) in
our Galaxy to justify an age greater than 7,000 years. Davies assumes that SNRs
will remain visible for 1 to 6 million years after the supernova event. In fact,
although they may in fact continue to exist for that length of time, they
become rapidly more difficult to detect as time passes. In the years
following a supernova event, the remaining gases spread out, becoming thinner
and thinner. They also become distorted by the interstellar medium (ISM), and
become difficult to observationally distinguish from the ISM. So, even though
SNRs can continue to exist for a few million years, most only remain
detectable for 20,000 to 120,000 years, depending on the size of the
supernova event and other factors. D.A. Leahy and Wu X. (Publications of the
Astronomical Society of the Pacific, v.101, pp.607-613 (June 1989)) discuss
the various effects limiting the detectability of SNRs. The remaining
discrepency between observation and Davies' predictions is accounted for by
various minor errors in Davies' paper. For a more detailed discussion of Davies'
claims, see Moore (2000),
http://www.valinor.freeserve.co.uk/supernova.html. Incidentally, Davies also
notes that no third-stage SNRs (SNRs that have been expanding for more than
120,000 years) have been detected in the Galaxy. As stated above, this is
because most SNRs are too spread out by that time to be detectable. However,
some third-stage SNRs in other galaxies come from supernova events that were so
large that the SNRs are still detectable. One known as SNR 0450-709, in the
Large Magellanic Cloud, is 340 light-years across, and has been expanding for
several hundred thousand years (see T.W. Jones et al, Publications of the
Astronomical Society of the Pacific, v.110, pp.125-151 (Feb 1998)). The
existence of such third-stage SNRs is inconsistent with the young-Universe
hypothesis.

It is sometimes claimed that subduction only gets rid of 10 percent of the
sediment being added to the oceans (D.R. Humphreys, Creation: Ex Nihilo,
v.13, no.1, p.31 (1991)). This claim is made by comparing one researcher's
estimate of the sediment being added to the oceans (V.V. Gordeyev et al,
Doklady Akademii Nauk SSSR, v.238, p.150 (1980)), to another researcher's
estimate of the amount of sediment being subducted (W.W. Hay et al, Journal
of Geophysical Research, v.93, no.B12, pp.14933-14940 (1988)). Humphreys
claims that, since Gordeyev's estimate is 25 times larger than Hay's, sediment
must be added to the ocean much faster than subduction can get rid of it, and
thus the lack of observed accumulated sediments remains a problem for old-Earth
scientists. The fallacy in that statement is that Hay based his estimate
entirely on the assumption that ocean sediment is in a steady state. Hay used
his own calculation of the amount of sediment in the ocean, which is much less
than Gordeyev's, to calculate the amount being subducted. If Hay had instead
used Gordeyev's estimate of the sediment in the ocean, his estimate of the
amount of sediment being subducted would have been correspondingly larger. In
short, Hay's estimate was based on an assumption of steady state, and it does
not make sense to compare his estimate with an alternate rate of accumulation in
an attempt to prove that a steady state does not exist.

Influx of Salts and Metals into the Ocean via Rivers
[DB 1506-1508 (15-19,42-68); OAB2]
By citing measurements of the amounts of various chemical compounds3
in the oceans, and measurements of the rate at which rivers are adding those
compounds to the oceans, it is claimed that a maximum age for the oceans can be
derived. The answer here is twofold. Firstly, processes that remove these
compounds from the oceans generally are not adequately accounted for. Secondly,
because these measurements are difficult to carry out, their accuracy is not
terribly high, so that, when removal processes are considered, a state of
equilibrium is either within the margin of error or very close to it (Some
recent young-Earth studies attempt to show that the claim is still valid even
when removal processes are accounted for; however, overly optimistic assumptions
about groundwater addition and statistical precision account for the remaining
discrepency). Therefore, this claim is both a
One-Sided Equationand an
Unexplained Mystery. There are many processes that take salt out of
seawater, including sea spray, high-temperature alteration of brine into albite
at undersea hydrothermal vents, and deposition to the ocean floor. Precipitates
on the sea floor will be swept clear periodically by plate tectonic subduction.
It is also important to realize that there is a great deal that we do not
understand about the deep ocean floor, due to the obvious difficulties in
studying it, and it is likely that there are other important processes going on
there that have yet to be discovered. For that reason, it is not very
responsible to speak as if we knew for sure that there is no other process
removing these compounds from seawater. D.R. Humphreys states that "as far as we
know, the remainder [of these chemicals] simply accumulates in the ocean" (Creation:
Ex Nihilo, v.13, no.1, p.31 (1991)). However, it is just as true (and much
more responsible) to say that, as far as we know, the processes exist on the
ocean floor that are keeping the concentrations of these chemicals in
equilibrium, but we have not yet rigorously measured them.

Another important point is that several of these "dating methods" published
in young-Earth references give ages that are impossibly young from any
perspective. For example, if this line of reasoning were valid, the amount of
aluminum in the ocean would prove that the Earth was only 100 years old! In
fact, if you look closely, the claims concerning Al, Pb, Ti, Cr, Mn, Fe, Th, and
W all "prove" Earth ages less of than 2,000 years! Are we to conclude that the
death and resurrection of Christ occurred before the Earth was created?
Obviously this is not true. The failure to give "Earth-age limits" that are
reasonable even from a young-Earth perspective demonstrates that this line of
reasoning cannot be valid: processes which remove salts from the ocean have not
been adequately taken into account.

Note regarding oceanic abundances claim: One point of concern is the
number of times that this claim is repeated in many young-Earth references. The
claim that "the ocean has fewer chemicals in it than we'd expect if it were old"
is really only one single piece of "evidence for a young-Earth". However, in
both DB and OAB, this claim is repeated dozens of times, each time using a
different chemical substance ("There's not enough Al...", "There's not enough
Pb...", etc.). The resulting effect of this is that the total number of claims
on a list of "evidences" is inflated. For example, since this claim is repeated
32 times in The Defender's Bible, it almost doubles the total number of
claims in that reference. A few other pieces of "young-Earth evidence" are also
repeated multiple times (each time with slight variation), with the effect of
increasing the total number of claims, but none on as large a scale as the
oceanic abundances. Of course, this would not be a topic of any concern
whatsoever, except for if the fact that many young-Earth publications do make a
big deal about the number of pieces of evidence that they claim support a
young Earth. The argument is often made that "The number of pieces of
evidence supporting a young Earth is greater than the number supporting an old
Earth." There are other responses to that argument, but it is very important to
realize that, if nothing else, the artificial inflation of the numbers by
repeating the oceanic abundances claim renders this argument invalid.

Lead in Zircons [OAB 42] and Helium in Hot Rocks
[OAB 36] Dr. Gentry (see
Parentless polonium halos, above) also measured the amounts of helium and
lead (both products of radioactive decary) in zircon crystals from a single
granite formation. The present temperature at each depth sampled was recorded.
The depths ranged from the surface to 4310 meters, while the temperatures ranged
from 20 to 313 degrees centigrade. Using standard methods to determine the
amount of lead produced by radioactive decay in the samples, Gentry found that
practically all of the expected lead was present in the samples, even though the
lead would be expected to have diffused away from the samples due to the high
temperatures (R.V. Gentry et al, Science, v.216, pp.296-298 (16 April
1982)). In his book Creation's Tiny Mystery, Gentry proposes an age limit
of 300,000 years based on his lead findings. Similarly, judging the amount of
helium produced from the amount of lead present, he found a significant amount
of helium (from 17% to 58% of his calculated limit) in samples down to 2900
meters of depth. Again he argued that the helium should have diffused away due
to the high temperatures if the sample were really hundreds of millions of years
old. On the other hand, and this may be of great importance, Gentry reported
that practically all of the helium had diffused away in the samples from deeper
than 2900 meters (R.V. Gentry et al, Geophysical Research Letters, v.9,
no.10, pp.1129-1130 (1982)). The likely explanation for Gentry's findings
seems to be that the formation from which he drew his samples has only recently
been subjected to temperatures high enough to cause diffusion. If so, the lack
of diffusion then would not date the rock formation itself, but rather the onset
of high temperatures. This is especially indicated by the complete diffusion of
helium in his deeper samples, since helium diffuses more easily than lead, and
the deeper parts of the formation would be expected to experience higher
temperatures earlier than the shallower parts. In fact, Gentry acknowledges in
the above-cited Science article that temperatures in the formation are
indeed thought to be rising. Need confirmed rebuttal from knowledgable source.
These claims are not present in the Defender's Bible, indicating that they have
been abandoned by ICR as weak.1

For many people, the idea of an ancient Earth is inextricably linked with an
Evolutionary Origin of the Species. In fact, the charge is often repeated that
the only reason people take old-Earth positions is because of a commitment to
Evolution. On the contrary, it is important to recognize the historical fact
that the evidence for an ancient Earth was recognized by geologists as early as
the late 18th century, more than 50 years before Darwin published his theory.
Most of these geologists were Christians who struggled with the implications of
their discoveries on their faith, yet could not deny the evidence that they saw
before them. Today, many Christians are similarly driven by evidence to an
old-Earth view.

I will now briefly outline some important lines of evidence for an ancient
age for the Earth and Universe. For more detail, please see the references cited
above, especially Roberts' notes.

This document is copyright 1999 and 2000 Matthew S. Tiscareno. Full
permission is given to reproduce or distribute this document, or to
rearrange/reformat it for other media, as long as credit is given and no words
are added or deleted from the text.